AAAI
2000 Travelogue

CAR – Austin

Got in around midnight,
courtesy of a high-level low that turned the Midwest into a thunderstorm
cauldron.And courtesy of the United
pilots and mechanics, who, since the employee buyout, have been staging a work slowdown
because the company’s owners are stupid.

It was 98 degrees.Dry heat, though.

Austin, like Seattle, has
escaped mallification.High on unique
things and places, low on Structure and Starbucks.Maybe it takes a fairy godmother—a big company beginning with an
“M” just over the horizon.Student and
tech culture dominate.Trendy (and
good) restaurants intercrop incubators and clubs.You couldn’t see Dell and Motorola downtown, but you could
feel them. There’s free bus service in the downtown core.Very little decay.

Every place I go, I take an
anti-postcard—a random shot that shows what the place really looks like.What’s wrong with this photo?Nothing.Even caught undressed, Austin looks just fine.Would I live here?Yes.

The Radisson was fine, but it was difficult to stay indoors.

Has indoor rock climbing
made it to your area?This gave me a
double take—rock climbing for the vertically impaired.I call the shot ”Little Rock”.

This last shot shows
Austin’s big tourist attraction, which you don’t find out about until you get
there.Over one million bats live
between the roadway and the concrete in the Congress Street bridge.During the day, in 120-degree heat with
trucks pounding overhead, they peacefully sleep.At sundown, they stream out through narrow slits in clouds for 45
minutes.

When it became clear that
it was getting dark and the bats would be as hard to image as their human
counterparts, I took this Monetish shot of the bridge and Colorado river.What do a million bats eat, I wondered, walking
back through clouds of batfood.

Also did the UT drag (as
the locals call it).Wanted to be
ultracool, so I wore my WebFirst t-shirt.If you want one too, contact Sanjay Patel at http://www.webfirst.com.But still, no one offered to sell me one of
Madonna’s pubic hairs (if you don’t get this, go rent Slacker).The best weirdness was a poster detailing
horrible UT experiments on children.I
was halfway down the list of experiments before I understood the tailer “our
arrogance makes this possible.”Arrogance that I share: I won’t concede that all primates are created
equal. I guess this puts me in Magneto’s camp.

CDR – AAAI-2000

Yes, the conference has
shrunk.By about half since its peak in
the 80s.It would have been 100%
academics (mostly students) if I hadn’t come. No big vision in the keynote
speech this year. The proceedings are down to one volume, which includes the
Innovative Apps proceedings, which used to be published as a book and distributed
to bookstores.Also, about half the
Innovative Apps were in development—formerly a no-no.Evidently there weren’t enough deployed apps to make up a
conference.

Cool MIT Media Lab Stuff

Last year it was a room with a back-projected virtual dog
that would interact with you.This year
it was Terminal Time.This was a
PBS-style history of the world assembled dynamically from over 150 clips.The system asked the audience questions and
got responses via an applause meter.Then it psyched out the audience class, race, religion and politics, and
created a history containing biases to piss everybody off.The spearheader was an artist who was
annoyed at the received-wisdom bias of documentaries (and news magazines, I might
add).

First reaction: X-men.Half the people who saw it wanted an action movie.The other half wanted a story of gifted
children who found a haven in Prof. Xavier’s school.Double the length by shooting the scenes for both stories, then
have the DVD player dynamically assemble a film of normal length that tells the
story either way.Then have the scenes
randomly mutate so you never see the story told twice the same way.

Second reaction:There was another talk by someone from Schlumberger/Paris on the future
of wireless and ubiquitous networking.A European phone smartcard has the power of a Vaxstation.He envisions the phone replaced with an
earplug that does 2-way voice (thru bone conduction?)The numeric pad goes away; the phone uses voice recognition.You talk to your appliances; you listen to
how close the bus is getting.(Those of
us who walk around talking to themselves and listening to voices are ahead of
their time.)

Combine this with Terminal Time, and I see personalized ads
whispering in your ear all day,Which
raises questions.

O When all
your personal characteristics are used to manipulate you, do you automatically
come to hate yourself?

O Will your
image stored on an EMC be more important to you than your image in other
people’s minds?

Research Areas in Brief

The big new thing is ontologies.OO programmers model the world with is-a and has-a relationships.
But if you want to do commonsense reasoning, and mix concretions with
abstractions, subtleties creep in. For example. A carrot is an entity.A carrot is a vegetable, which is an
entity.But a carrot is also food,
which is not an entity.Philosophers
have worked out models for this kind of thing. I think this stuff will be
really useful.CYC is available
now.I’m waiting to see the results.

NLP continues to progress.The chances of correctly parsing a phrase are up from 60% ten years ago
to 90%.But in a 5-clause New York
Times sentence, the chances of getting the whole sentence right is.9**5, or
about 60%.For an Allgemeine Zeitung
sentence, it must approach zero.So
parsing is better, but still not good enough.Most of the advances came from tricks (ok, heuristics) that make
cognitive scientist’s eyes glaze because they don’t reflect an understanding of
natural language.

On innovative application of NL was a e-mail monitor for a
brokerage that attempts to detect insider trading, hype and hard sells.

E-commerce is generating a new field of agents for optimal
auctions.Turns out optimal bidding is hard
when there are bundles, for example, a toothbrush is worth 6, toothpaste is
worth 0, and both are worth 10.

Robots were all over
the exhibit floor.It was hard not to
trip on one, and vice versa. There was a high school botball contest, search
and rescue robots, and robots serving canapés.

Despite the proximity to UT, there was virtually nothing
from the qualitative reasoning crowd.

Better Than The Average Bear

On
a completely different subject… The NVCMC had a group ride the Saturday after I
got back.As with most motorcycle
clubs, it’s mandatory to take a boring posed photo at every event.I decided to break tradition, bring a
camera, and take candid shots. I got some that are better than the average
bear.

This was a grab shot
like the rest—but check out the composition.

Motorcycles turn even
jarheads into kids.

Ric is probably telling
his wife that in about an hour I’ll be leading half the club toward Harper’s
Ferry instead of downtown DC.